Foundation Series: Kitchen essentials

Feeding yourself is a fundamental part of taking care of yourself.

We’re not all Heston Blumenthol’s, Gordon Ramseys or Masterchefs.

Cooking is a skill that most of us learned from our social environments.

What you ate as a kid, you probably still mostly eat now.

What you learned from your folks is probably 80% of what you know how to cook now.

Everyone should learn to cook, in its most basic form, it’s insurance that you can take care of yourself.

If we wanna push it out a little bit, Cooking gives us fundamental knowledge and control into what goes into our body. It gives us the fundamental ability to control quality and quantity.

A knowledge gap is a space between what you currently know, to what you need to know in order to be able to do something. Cooking is a skill like any other, It requires knowledge of several pieces in order to do it effectively.

This blog covers the very basics of things that I think are worth having in the kitchen and some of their basic uses, while this information may seem basic, some stats indicate that at least 30% of people cook less than twice a week.

Some people don’t have a lot of experience cooking for themselves, they are often missing some of the fundamental tools for cooking, so let’s start there.

A by no means exhaustive list of things you’ll likely use in a kitchen.

Knives

Cutting boards

Pots

Pans

Roast/baking Trays

Spatulas, mixing spoons, tongs

Graters

Steamers

Mixing bowls

Scales

Tupperware

Meat Thermometer (this is not essential, but amplifies cooking meat if you’re not strong at this skill)

Pressure cooker/Slow cooker/Rice Cooker combo (highly recommended, but not essential)

If you have all these things, great. If not, consider getting them.

Kitchen basics: Stuff that cuts

Cutting stuff is a pretty essential part of the transmutation part of cooking.

Pictured: A Bread knife, A santoku, a chefs knife, another vegetable knife, a pairing knife, a mandolin, a burring hone and a sharpening hone.

You don’t really need a whole lot of knives but it’s nice to see some general options (these are the ones that I use).

The basic jist of knives are that some shapes and sizes are more convenient for cutting specific things, I don’t think it matters hugely when your knife is sharp and not too heavy for your hand when dealing with home cooking.

Essentials; IMO you only really NEED 2 knives. A pairing knife and a chef’s knife.

Having 2 decent knives will cover off 80% of the things you’ll ever need to do. A Santoku or vegetable knife is a nice addition for convenience (plus I like to have 2 cutting boards running at a time, 1 for veggies, 1 for meats etc so I don’t have to keep washing the knife between).

A chef’s knife cuts all the big stuff, a pairing knife cuts all the small stuff. Real Simple.

I think it’s worth having decent knives, the edges stay sharper longer typically and the handles and weight are pretty nice to use.

You can often visit a decent homewares place and buy them in a 2 pack. Bueno.

A bread knife is pretty self explanatory, If you’re living that Pidgeon hole sourdough life, this is a sensible investment.

A mandolin is often used for fast, thin shredding of vegetables, I use mine for making slaws or speeding through slicing where maybe I wanna do a lot, or I want something very specific 2 mm apple slices for a cheeseboard (I know bougie as fuck).

Learning to use a knife is something that’s partly learned but mostly practiced, so I recommend trying to get good at safe-cutting practices. (We can cover how to’s in a future blog)

Steels are used to sharpen knives, this skill is easy to learn, and owning them means you can keep your knives razor-sharp all the time. Periodically I get mine professionally done.

You tend to cut faster and you typically cut yourself less - kinda counter-intuitive but that’s what chefs always tell me.

You’re going to need something to cut on - I recommend getting a few different sized boards and having a few on hand, I will just switch out boards between raw meat to cooked meat and keep a seperate one for vegetables. It’s just more expedient for cooking itself and the time between washing 1 board and 3 is negligible. (I mostly use plastic ones for meat)

Stuff to cook in: Pots, Pans, Trays et al

A couple of decent frypans - for frying and sautéing things. I like 1 big one, 1 medium one. Just for convenience of cooking more food or less food or multiple things at once. Lots of getting good at cooking is getting good at workflow.

A roasting tray or two helps batch cook veggies and meats. I like to cook these things separately.

I don’t frequently use pots personally - I don’t tend to boil much except pasta or noodles for Asian (or the odd pack of mi goreng) which I don’t personally cook that frequently. Having a small and medium-sized one has done me, but I also have a stockpot that I haven’t used in forever. I just use my pressure cooker now.

I steam vegetables in an Asian style stacker that I bought from an Asian grocer (they’re super cheap), which I highly recommend, you can put different vegetables in different levels so you can take them off the heat as you go, so you can keep them crisp and not overcook things that take different time to steam. They just sit over a pot.

Other stuff: Everything else

Get a Grater - great for cheese, but also good for getting extra vegetables into sauces. (I also use a microplane for things like parmesan but this is a bougie extra)

Spatulas, you’ll need a couple, Same for tongs and mixing spoons.

A colander for getting rid of water from your pasta/noodles

A set of scales - being able to measure how much you’re portioning is important if you’re working on dieting. Also good for baking (but I don’t bake).

Mixing bowls, a set of 3 in different sizes.

Tupperware, you’ll need for food prep - avoiding BPA plastics is good - I have some fancy glass ones but have been stocking up on leakproof ones made by sistema from woolies recently and now most of the staples of the kitchen live in them.

Extras

I use a slow cooker/pressure cooker combo a lot, I’m a lazy cook and when I food prep for the week I don’t want to spend a lot of time doing it.

Curries, stews, stocks, bulk rice. These bad boys are a nice set and forget option I recommend for food prep, mine is used a couple of times a week, they last a long time.

Wrap Up

Home cooking is a fun and essential skill. You’ll need the basic equipment if you want to do it well. Start here, next week we’ll cover off pantry staples. Spices, oils, produce thats worth keeping on hand.